Why you should be using video for your business

Monday, 1 June 2015, by Stephen Longworth

Using visuals in your marketing has the potential to increase the effectiveness significantly (for an example, click here). Videos in particular have enjoyed a grand upward spiral in usage and appreciation. The stats keep flooding in to back up the hype; using video to get your message across means you are much more likely to get people interested in what you have to say (rather than if you just keep sending out pages of plain text).

Stats from Forbes Insights (@ForbesInsights) show that 59% of senior executives would rather watch a video than read text. Of course, making a video these days is relatively easy. However, when it comes to thinking up a video that really gets your brand message across in a thoughtful and interesting way, that takes some expertise and a bit more work. Thankfully there are people out there (disclosure: including us) who can help with that side of things. When the stats go on to state that 65% of those who view a video then go on to click through to visit the source’s website - with 50% looking for more information, 45% saying they contacted the source and 50% saying they went on to make a purchase for their business - they aren’t stats that we can just nod along with anymore. These are powerful stats which we can all use to our advantage.

There are different ways to get your target audience to view your video too; email is an effective marketing strategy to note in 2015 and when you pop a video in, click-through rate is increased by 96% (Implix survey). An email straight to a perspective client that is likely to get them venturing to your website sounds very worthwhile.

Of course, getting videos up on your website will add plenty of creativity and interest to your site. Getting people to stay on your website for at least 3 minutes (3:16 according to @contently) is now the number to aim for. If consumers stay on a website for this amount of time, they are at least 50% more likely to return to that company website. With this in mind, a study by Comscore (@comScore) found that the average time a visitor spends on a website increases by two minutes after they watch a video. Plus, if you have a video, you are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of a Google search. Hooray for video.